Third-rate thriller

Donacirc;euro;trade;t go away. The next episode of India8217;s hilarious thriller, The Hunt for Chotta Rajan8217;, is about to begin. For those who missed the action so far, here is a quick rerun of the story. Indian law enforcement agencies struck lucky when Rajan was shot by gangsters and put into a Bangkok hospital on September 15. At last the mafia don could be captured and brought back to stand trial on criminal charges which included several murders. For ten nail-biting weeks, Mumbai cops stood by, ready to fly out and arrest him just as soon as New Delhi wrote out a formal request for extradition to the Thai authorities. But the wily Rajan recovered smartly from his bullet injuries, knotted the sheets from his 600-a-day hospital bed into a rope and climbed out of a fourth floor window. He was gone. Justice was cheated. New Delhi was still shuffling papers and Mumbai holding its breath. Now fingers are being pointed at the Thai police because they were supposed to guard him round the clock and round the year 8212; for as longas it took Indian cops to come and get him.

This shabby tale is something even a third rate Bollywood producer would be ashamed to touch. It is all the Indian public has been given. To date there is no clear statement from New Delhi about the government8217;s intentions in the Chotta Rajan affair. As for Maharashtra, after appearing at the start to be interested in his arrest, the home ministry has subsided into silence. No one believes the Bangkok story, of course. Everyone suspects that there was never any intention to get the mafia don and it was just a matter of stalling until he could escape. Even the stalling was clumsy, leaving government footprints all over it. Indians have grown quite cynical about the failings of their law enforcement agencies and suspect the interplay of a whole array of subterranean motives and factors. It is not the image of the bumbling cop that comes to mind at such times. It is the nexus between politicians and criminals about which so much has been revealed but so little done to end it. Short of actually saying so,central agencies made it very obvious they did not want the mafia don brought in. Why? The speculation ranges from political patronage to spy-thriller stuff about Rajan8217;s uses in countering the ISI. Whatever it is, it is outrageous that the authorities cannot move against a known master criminal and are widely seen to be accommodating him.

After the hunt for Chotta Rajan is there any chance of the combined forces of the Centre and two state governments capturing Veerappan? It can certainly be done. But if there has not been a high rate of success in rounding up major criminals, it is because those in power find them useful and do not want them brought to book. Some politicians are trying to present Rajan as a champion of the people8217;s interests in the same way that Veerappan presents himself as a popular hero and a Robin Hood. These are dangerous myths intended to protect those who are essentially the reverse of what they are made out to be. Mafia dons are anti-social, not guardians of the people.And only in pulp fiction do they eliminate entities hostile to the state.